Anne Stevenson Quotes

Be your own artist, and always be confident in what you're doing. If you're not going to be confident, you might as well not be doing it.

Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn't mean only artistic creativity, although that's part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.

I do love being solo because I can have more of my own creative input to every aspect of my career.

When you finish a series like 'Ugly Betty,' there are so many voices around you telling you what you should be doing next and what would be good for your future, sometimes you can't hear yourself. I've gotten pretty good at tuning everyone else out. Now it's just me; what pleases me creatively.

Success gave me confidence as an artist. And now I'm able to do what I want without anybody thinking it's dumb.

You can think what you like of Madonna - about her political choices and her PR - but you have to respect her courage not to let the critics stop her exploring her potential.

I'm very independent, creatively, always trying to push myself - and I think that comes from my mother.

I wanted to express myself. I wanted to be creative and I didn't want to worry about someone bossing me around in the process. You have to struggle no matter where you are to get to where you're going, so I'm like, working it honey!

Not so much the sound but as a person, I would say Katy Perry inspires me because you can always see that she's being true to herself. She focuses on her music and even turns down big producers. Her whole career and music is about her being herself. I want to be more like that.

We did what we wanted to do, made it work, and made our own rules - and the best art we could - along the way.

Coming out of a group, it's always really fun and creative to do your own thing.

I'm a little bit more proud of Solange. She chose to do it her way. Because in the beginning, we wanted to mold her into this pop star, and that is not who she is. And we were wrong. I was wrong, the record labels were wrong... She wanted to do it her own way, and she did.

I think the big evolutionary step for me is directing my own movies.

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

When my creative side isn't being fulfilled, I see it affect me in a negative way and I'm not able to become that father/husband/man that I want to be. So it's almost like this dark half that you have to satiate in order to become full, in order to become a good person.

Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life.

Study hard. Work hard. Play harder. Don't be bound by rules, don't hurt anybody and never ever live somebody else's dream.

Do the thing itself. Don’t pay much mind to critics or what anyone says about it. Just do it, in any form possible, and watch others doing it. Take it in viscerally, get it by osmosis. Don’t ever read your own reviews, certainly not the good ones.

Poetry has in a way been my bridge to my acting career. I had so many questions about my life, so I took to poetry to express my questions. I had questions about politics, family relationships, and more.

Once you act with someone, who gives you so much to feed off of, you just have to be there and be yourself, and it comes out.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.

Just to stay focused on my path and not the path that other people or media want to put me in. Just to stay focused on my vision, because I put out what I want people to know about me. Everything else is what the media puts out.

Life choices and projects and photo shoots, I can't base them on anybody else but myself. I've done things where I'm like, "Do I want my dad to see this? I don't know!" But the best lesson I can teach my sisters, or any younger women, is "Do what YOU do. Don't follow me, follow you."

I've discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.